Dazzlepaint – A to Z
Abbott Handerson Thayer was an American original. Nowadays, he is renowned for being the father of American camouflage, but in his day, he was admired for his angel paintings. The first of these, painted in 1887, was a winged portrait of his daughter Mary as the personification of virginal, spiritual beauty. Although Thayer called the canvas “Angel,” these were not paintings of angels. The wings, he said, were only there to create “an exalted atmosphere.”
This combination of art and naturalism underlay Thayer’s theory of concealing coloration, which allowed animals to hide from their predators. Thayer believed nature “obliterates” contrast first by blending in, as with the colorations of animals that mimic the creatures’ environments. This is enhanced by its polar opposite, disruption, in which strong arbitrary patterns of color flatten contours and break up outlines, so the hidden creatures either disappear or look to be something other than what they are.
When WWI broke out, John Singer Sargent was so impressed by the usefulness of Thayer’s theories that he arranged an appointment at the War Office. It ended in typical Thayer fashion when he fled, leaving Sargent to open a package of his proofs. To Sargent’s shock and embarrassment, it contained Thayer’s paint-daubed Norfolk jacket. Pinned across it were scraps of fabric and several of his wife’s stockings. But Thayer later received word that his trip had born some sort of fruit: “Our British soldiers are protected by coats of motley hue and stripes of paint as you suggested,” wrote the wife of the British ambassador to the United States.
Byrdcliffe is not the fictionalized Ker-Ys. But it was the arts colony that put Woodstock on the map. Founded by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife Jane Byrd McCall in 1903, its name was a combination of their two middle names. Both Ralph and Jane can be most kindly described as dilettantes — the kind of people who would found a utopian brotherhood of artists complete with servants’ quarters. But in its heyday, Byrdcliffe attracted such social justice luminaries as John Dewey and Ellen Gates Starr – not to mention writers, intellectuals, and artists that included Will Durant, Wallace Stevens, Helen Hayes, and Bob Dylan.Read more about the real Byrdcliffe here: https://www.woodstockguild.org/about-byrdcliffe/byrdcliffe-history/
Catskill Fairies
The Catskills were shrouded in legends of mysterious creatures long before Washington Irving introduced us to the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s men playing at ninepins in “Rip van Winkle.” An older version of the same story tells of how Hudson and his crew first saw the Catskill gnomes, metal-working pygmies with long, bushy beards and eyes like pigs, capering about a fire on the precipice overlooking their moored craft. The gnomes welcomed the crew into their dance and plied them with a strange liquor – which, come daybreak, Hudson saw had transformed them into gnomes as well.
These legends also appear in Virginia W. Johnson’s children’s book, The Catskill Fairies, albeit in far more sugarcoated form. Job, a simple farm boy, finds himself snowed in alone with an angora cat on Christmas Eve, only to have his time beguiled by such creatures as Rapp the Gnome King and Queen Puff of the Fairies telling him stories until his grandfather arrives to rescue him in the morning.
Dazzlepaint is as much an art form as one of the most sophisticated forms of camouflage ever invented. Attempts to conceal or disguise troops and weapons are nothing new; think of Macbeth’s Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. Somewhat less successful attempts include a rather ambitious plan to disguise horses as cows and haystacks to avoid aerial surveillance during WWI. But while rowboats and small crafts could be easily disguised as logs or outcroppings along the shore, it was impossible to use this approach to protect Allied ships from the threat of Germany’s U-Boats on the open sea. Not that people didn’t try: the first attempt to disguise a battleship as a floating island was so top heavy, the camouflage fell off before the ship even left the harbor. In contrast, dazzlepaint doesn’t try to hide the fact you’re seeing a ship; its jagged lines and awkward angles are instead meant to confuse your perception of the vessel’s direction, speed, and size, so that it is impossible to accurately aim a weapon at it. Modern technology has reduced dazzlepaint to nothing but an elegant artifact, but it remains a tribute to the artistic power of misdirection.
Edward “Ned” Thatcher was a longstanding and popular Woodstock resident who was Byrdcliffe’s most well known metalworker, as well as an instructor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University. He arrived at Byrdcliffe in the first summer of 1903 and set to work teaching metalwork as well as designing and crafting metal fixtures for the Byrdcliffe furniture. Thatcher was not only a metalworker; he also was a painter and writer with a quick wit who wrote for the local newspaper under the name “Iddie Flitcher.” Like fellow metalworker Bertha Thompson, Thatcher also entered the field of occupational therapy, developing ways to teach wounded World War I veterans how to make toys and other objects out of tin cans, for which he accrued not only fame but offers from toy companies.
Fair Folk
Despite their popular name, the Fair Folk are anything but fair. They are fickle and unpredictable, but when they strike a bargain, they hold to it – even if long after the fact, you realize that what you bargained for isn’t what you wanted at all. Legend has it they are the Unfallen, the angels who did not take a side in the great war between Heaven and Hell, condemned to spend their immortality here in the Middle Kingdom. Any mortal who dares to treat with them would well remember that they always speak the truth, but that truth is never what they mean.
Gradlon was a 5th century warrior king who fell in love with Malgven, Queen of the North, and conspired with her to kill her elderly husband.
Shunned by both their peoples for their crime, they were forced to wander the sea on Morvarc’h, Malgven’s magical black horse, which breathed fire and was able to gallop across the waves.
In time, Malgven gave birth to a daughter, Dahut. According to some versions of the story, giving birth killed the queen. According to other versions, she didn’t die but simply announced it was time for her to return to her world. She ordered Gradlon to leave her alone on the next island they saw; otherwise they could never see the earth again.
Gradlon returned with his daughter to Ys, a city built beneath sea level, which was protected by a gate that kept the waves at bay. Influenced by a mysterious, diabolical lover, Dahut turned the city into a place of sin and debauchery. One night she stole the key to the gate to allow her lover to visit her and the city was flooded. Gradlon awoke and rescued his daughter from the drowning city on his magical horse, but her sins kept dragging them into the sea before he could reach land. In the end Saint Winwaloe told him to drop his daughter. She was swallowed by the sea and became a siren who lured men to their deaths.
HMS Hampshire
There is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding WWI. Chief among them is the death of Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was himself the stuff of legend: The face of England’s Recruiting poster, he was a populist favorite and a political nightmare rumored to be King Arthur returned to save his country in its hour of direst need.
He set off on the Hampshire on June 5, 1916 to negotiate with Tsar Nicholas II only to have the vessel sink with the catastrophic loss of 737 souls, including Kitchener and his staff, within hours of its leaving port. The official explanation was that it ran into a German mine, but rumors immediately began to swirl. The kindest among them was that one of his own crewmembers was a German spy who signaled the vessel’s location to a waiting UBoat before escaping to safety. The crueler rumors hinted that Whitehall was not unhappy to have Kitchener out of the way for good. Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s Bosie, an ardent anti-Semite in later life, went so far as to claim that Kitchener was murdered as part of a Jewish-financed financial conspiracy. Churchill successfully sued for libel and Douglas was sent to jail. But that did little to dispel the mystery that shrouds the sinking of the HMS Hampshire to this day.
Illustrators
Kate Ames is completely fictional. However, she has her roots in all the brilliant illustrators that made the turn of the twentieth century the Golden Age of book illustration – including the greatest flower fairy illustrator of all, Cicely Mary Barker, whose work is well worth exploring at her website, here: Meet The Fairies
And of course, there’s always Woodstock’s own Maud and Miska Petersham – who did not live at Byrdcliffe, but had a house, Storybook, barely a mile down the road.
By all appearances, they danced with the fairies as well.
J.Edgar Hoover had Woodstock in his sights for most of his career. But his campaign didn’t begin during the Bob Dylan years. Instead, Woodstock attracted Hoover’s notice in the summers of 1919-1920 when various socialist and labor organizations, many associated with the ILGWU, established summer retreats at the Overlook Hotel. In 1919, the 24-year-old Hoover had risen through the ranks of the War Emergency Division’s Alien Enemy Bureau to become the Director of the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, commonly known as the Radical Division, because of its mandate to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals. Prime among his targets was the Socialist Party of America, whose burgeoning Left Wing Section was causing alarm both within the party and without. In January, 1919, Lenin invited the Left Wing to join the Comintern, the International Communist party, and follow the party line as set by Moscow. The result was a series of contested elections and factional strife, culminating in a series of party summits. At least one of those summits was held at Overlook Hotel, leading to Hoover’s lasting suspicion of Woodstock as a hotbed of insurrection.
Kelmscott Chaucer is widely said to be one of the three jewels of art and crafts bookmaking along with the Ashendene Dante and the Doves Bible.
Here is a copy of the Doves Bible, bound by Ellen Gates Starr, “one of the best known of all Cobden Sanderson’s pupils” and the one who, more than any other, “shared his high ideals, refusing to sell her bindings or to teach until she felt she was fully proficient.”
Starr is best known for the bindery she established at Hull House, the Chicago settlement house she had co-founded with Jane Addams, devoted to “the betterment of the poor, and the protection of working girls and immigrants.” But Starr also taught and practiced bookbinding at Byrdcliffe for many years.
Land of Rip van Winkle by Mrs. A.E.P. Searing, is one of many 19TH– century folklore collections that expanded on the stories in Washington Irving’s Sketchbook to bolster the Catskills’ reputation a tourist destination. Mrs. A.E.P. Searing was in fact the wife of a proprietor of the Overlook Hotel, and her book was intended to draw visitors to the always precariously successful business. Like her contemporaries, Mrs. Searing depended largely on coating traditional European legends with a veneer of Native American authenticity, interspersed with some arch framing of day trippers on a Hudson River steamer and a few authentic New England legends, such as the missing treasure of Captain Kidd. Still, it is a lovely addition to the library of any Hudson River enthusiast.
Maverick
The Maverick Colony, led by Hervey White, broke free from the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony soon after its founding, in 1905, to find a greater degree of freedom. The name “Maverick” was derived from legends of a white stallion living in freedom that White heard during his 1890 visit to his sister in Colorado. In 1911 Hervey wrote a poem, “The Adventures of a Young Maverick,” with the poem’s hero being the Maverick Horse. White felt it was a suitable symbol for everything he cherished—freedom, spirit, and uniqueness. So in the summer of 1924, White commissioned John Flannagan, a sculptor who joined the summer artists at Maverick, to carve “The Maverick Horse,” which still can be seen in the Maverick Concert Hall today.
The Maverick Colony operated on the traditional witch’s creed: An [if] it harm none, do as you will. Its annual festival quickly burgeoned a bohemian carnival that attracted more than just locals. The New York Herald Tribune reported over 6,000 in attendance in 1929, and an estimated 2,000 more gate-crashers marred the Festival with reports of difficulty in audience control, drunken brawls, robberies, and even rapes. With the necessary intervention by the State Patrol, by 1930 local censure and protest called the event “sinful and immoral” and White was, eventually, compelled to suspend the Maverick Festival in 1931. In comparison, does the Woodstock Festival look that wild?
Newgold, Morris
The last proprietor of the Overlook Hotel was arguably everything Woodstock feared in the aftermath of the Great War. A Jewish millionaire who had made his fortune in the hotel industry in New York City, he sought to expand his holdings to the Catskills. Anti-Semitism contributed to his failure, although it was not the only factor. The bad luck pursing the Overlook Hotel was rapidly becoming the stuff of legend, regardless of whether you chose to ascribe it to a Native American curse for defiling their sacred mountaintop. And the era of the grand hotels was on the wane. Even the fabled Catskill Mountain House was struggling. Whatever the reason, Newgold began renting out the Overlook Hotel to the Unity Club, a recreational arm of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, with strong ties to the American Communist Party, beginning in 1919.
Overlook Hotel — No, not THAT Overlook Hotel
The business of the Catskills has always been tourism – even as the good farmers of Woodstock grumbled about letting out their spare rooms to the artists who arrived in search of the light, fabled to rival that of Provence. The grandest of all the Mountain Houses in the Catskills was, of course, the fabled Catskill Mountain House, which loomed above Palenville, NY. The pearl of the Mountain Houses in Woodstock was the Overlook Hotel, visited by no less a personage than U.S. Grant, followed in rapid succession by Mead’s Mountain House. Although it is just a ruin now, it still attracts visitors in the form of hikers, and remains one of the most photographed places in Woodstock. To learn more about the many mountain houses in Woodstock, visit the Woodstock Historical Society’s exhibit: The Mountain House: Dreams in the Sky here: http://www.historicalsocietyofwoodstock.org/
Phantom Bowmen of Mons was a patriotic short story by journalist and fantasy writer Arthur Machen, about how the legendary bowmen of Henry V returned from the field of Agincourt to defend the British soldiers facing certain defeat at Mons. At least, that is, until many soldiers stepped forward to claim that was exactly what happened. PR stunt? Mass hallucination? Something more? Men see what they need to in times of war.
Quicksand, Hervey White’s autobiographical novel, is largely forgotten now. But this bildungsroman published in 1900 was described by Theodore Dreiser as one of the six great American novels. Publisher and author of both adult and YA novels, White was also a co-founder of the Byrdcliffe Colony. However, he is now best remembered as the visionary founder of the Maverick Colony.
Reservoir
The commandeering of local communities by New York City to construct the Ashokan Reservoir as the city’s water supply is the stuff of Catskill legend. Eleven villages were evacuated to make room for what was at the time the world’s largest reservoir. Not just houses, churches and business, but even the dead were moved, lest they, too, contaminate the water supply. The city offered residents $15 a body to dig up their graves and take the remains of their friends and family with them.
Some people believe that when the reservoir is low, you can see church steeples and chimneys poking above the water. That is highly unlikely, for any buildings that were not moved were razed or burned. However, many remains including foundations, walls, and chimneys are still visible on the shores of the reservoir, especially from the Ashokan Rail Trail. Other traces remain as well. Several buildings were rescued before the Ashokan was flooded, including Winchell’s Pizza & BBQ, which claims to be housed in what was once a general store and theater transported from Brown Station. And any motorist or cyclist along Route 28A that marks the Southern edge of the reservoir are familiar with passing the many ghostly signs like this one, the only memorials of the many communities sacrificed so that New York City could have clean water.
The commandeering of local communities by New York City to construct the Ashokan Reservoir as the city’s water supply is the stuff of Catskill legend. Eleven villages were evacuated to make room for what was at the time the world’s largest reservoir. Not just houses, churches and business, but even the dead were moved, lest they, too, contaminate the water supply. The city offered residents $15 a body to dig up their graves and take the remains of their friends and family with them.
Some people believe that when the reservoir is low, you can see church steeples and chimneys poking above the water. That is highly unlikely, for any buildings that were not moved were razed or burned. However, many remains including foundations, walls, and chimneys are still visible on the shores of the reservoir, especially from the Ashokan Rail Trail. Other traces remain as well. Several buildings were rescued before the Ashokan was flooded, including Winchell’s Pizza & BBQ, which claims to be housed in what was once a general store and theater transported from Brown Station. And any motorist or cyclist along Route 28A that marks the Southern edge of the reservoir are familiar with passing the many ghostly signs like this one, the only memorials of the many communities sacrificed so that New York City could have clean water.
Seelie Court
Often referred to as the Gentry, they are the high court of the Sidhe. Beautiful and entrancing, they are everyone’s image of the Fair Folk. But bright and beautiful as they are, they are every bit as dangerous as their Unseelie brethren. For like all the Unfallen, they are the angels who took no sides in the war between Heaven and Hell, Born prevaricators, they can speak nothing but the truth; however, their words rarely mean what they seem to. However, they are capable of rare heroism, if only out of ungovernable passion, usually for love of human.
Teufelshunden, Devil Dogs or Hell Hounds, was the respectful nickname the Germans gave the U.S. Marines for their ferocity in battle.
The Marines turned the tide of WWI when they entered at the peak of the bloody and indecisive Battle of Belleau Wood – and Major Lloyd W. Williams (who served and died at Chateau-Thierry) retorted “Retreat? Hell, we just got here” to the French who advised the arriving troops to abandon a battle no-one could win.
Instead, the Marines charged with another legendary battle cry, ascribed to Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Daly, “Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?”
Unseelie Court
The Unseelie Court is the Court of the Others among the Unfallen. Unlovely and awkward magical creatures such as brownies, kobolds, and other monsters, the Unseelie Court is as powerful as their brethren in the Seelie Court. But they have been dismissed as monsters for so long that they shun human company. Nonetheless, they thrive on such human passions as honor and valor, and so were drawn to the fields of WWI to interfere with the affairs of men – and it would be unwise of any man to underestimate them, especially based on their appearance.
Vanishing Village
You think Woodstock was always about hippies and rock and roll? Then you need to read The Vanishing Village by Will P. Rose. This charming memoir charts the arrival of the artists who founded the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in 1903 from a child’s point of view. Woodstock, in 1903, was as individualistic as it has always been, but it was NOT liberal. Instead, it was a stolid farming community whose center of government was the Dutch Reformed Church – and the regulars who communed around the white-bellied stove in Rose’s father’s general store. But those farmers realized quickly enough that the business of the Catskills was tourism – not to mention that there was money to be made from the students and artists who flocked to Woodstock in search of fresh air and the light, which the founders of Byrdcliffe said was equal to that of Provence.
Woodstock
Okay, once and for the record, it didn’t happen here. The Woodstock Festival happened 100 miles away, in Bethel, NY. And for the record, the Thruway was never closed. I know nothing about the brown acid. But I can tell you that by 1969, Woodstock’s Bohemian reputation was so firmly established, that Michael Lang, the entrepreneur who created the festival, was determined to attach Woodstock’s name to the concert. The rest, as they like to say, was history.
Xenophobia was an unfortunate fact of life in the Catskills. Yes, the brochure really says that: Hebrews and pulmonary patients not entertained. There’s no point in defending the statement or the attitudes that underlies it.
Yasgur, Max
Yasgur’s Dairy Farm was one of the largest milk producers in Sullivan county, when Max Yasgur agreed to lease his fields to the Woodstock Festival. A conservative Republican, and in the words of organizer Michael Lang, “the antithesis of what the Woodstock Festival stood for,” Max Yasgur addressed the crowd as follows, just before Joe Cocker’s legendary set.
“I’m a farmer. I don’t know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world — not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State; you’ve proven something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that you’ve had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you’re taken care of… they’d enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that, the important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I – God bless you for it!”
Zimmerman Telegram
The Zimmerman Telegram was the event that finally caused America to enter into WWI. There is no question it was a conspiracy. The only question is, who was conspiring with whom, to accomplish what? The undeniable facts are that the Telegram was secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico, and its disclosure swayed sway public opinion in the United States against Germany. The details, to say the least, were far murkier.
To begin with, it was British Intelligence that intercepted and decoded the telegram. At that point, many Americans wished to avoid the conflict in Europe. If the British could convince the Americans that the text was genuine, it would provide much needed support to their cause, but it would also expose that they had broken the German codes. Even worse, many Americans believed the message was an elaborate forgery created by British intelligence. The president, Woodrow Wilson, knew better, but he could not make the evidence public without compromising the British codebreaking operation.
The definitive solution to the problem raised almost as many doubts as it answered. On 29 March 1917, Zimmermann gave a speech in the Reichstag in which he admitted the telegram was genuine, but he refused to say on whose behest it was sent – or why?
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